Lee Maguire graded snobberies, bawdiness, hypocrisy

BPM

So what happens when the device that records your medical status is also the device you use to update your social connections?

Yes We Spam!

Oh dear. Looks like the African advance fee scammers have hijacked Blue State Digital – Barak Obama’s campaign technology backend providers.

Maybe that cyber-security review can’t come soon enough…

Return-path: nobody@bluestatedigital.com
Delivery-date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:27:33 +0000
Received: from web11.bluestatedigital.com ([70.42.50.177])
by [redacted]
id 1LXePM-0000sS-I9; Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:27:32 +0000
Received: by web11.bluestatedigital.com (Postfix, from [...]

US Government declares war on zombies

I overheard someone bitching about SPEWS blocking Telewest the other day, about how SPEWS had gone too far (seriously, are people really using SPEWS?) treating innocent users as spammers blah blah blah. The BBC story has quote from the ISP, Telewest, about why they’ve apparently been so slack about stemming the tide of spam [...]

Nasty brutessh and snort

In late July I started to get a lot of emails via logcheckinforming me of failed single attempts to log into the (disabled) guest account. Probably using a blank password, which was traditionally the access method on Unix servers offering anonymous, and usually restricted, shell logins.
Jul 26 02:31:40 foobar sshd[24171]: Failed password for guest from x.30.170.12 port [...]

SPF redux

About a year ago I got excited by the prospects of the SPF anti-spam scheme. Of course this is before Microsoft negotiated to merge SPF with their own “Caller-ID” scheme and the dark cloud of IP licensing poisoned my support.
Anyway, to repeat the main problem with SPF: SPF validated using envelope sender addresses. This was good because it meant [...]

Until the end of time

Remember “GeT“? At the beginning of 2000 it was being touted as Tony Blair’s big idea for e-commerce. As he put it on the scheme’s (now defunct) website at get-time.org:
I am delighted to announce today that UK industry has taken the lead in building a key component of the emerging global electronic marketplace: Greenwich Electronic Time – the global time [...]

X-Know-Archive

A Socratic correspondent writes:
From today I’ll be forwarding most of my mail to my gmail.com account. Note that gmail doesn’t support TLS so your mail to me will be sent in the clear. And of course, all our correspondence will be stored in a database with access controlled by a US based company, who (regardless their commitments to “not [...]

Everyone in China

So, today’s Media Guardian has an article about net use in China which includes a nice little quote by the CEO of an online marketing company about why companies should pay attention to China:
Apart from the simple fact that if everyone in China went online at the same time, it would bring the whole net down
I like “simple facts” [...]

Hotmail adopts a whitelist

Bouquets to Hotmail for adopting the Bonded Sender whitelist that I mentioned back in 2002.
Brickbats to the Slashdot monkeyboys who can somehow spin a positive antispam development into a Microsoft-is-evil story. Sigh.

Invitation lost in the post

There was an orkut invite in my “suspicious” mailbox due to a combination of an invalid Received: header and a not-guaranteed-unique Message-ID: (i.e. contains only a hostname rather than a FQDN.)
Received: from orkut
<9C>by Orkut Router with SMTP<9C> id i3J3dLZU004522
for <lee@example.com>; [...]